


Nor Earth Sustain

by regshoe



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 03:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12903075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regshoe/pseuds/regshoe
Summary: The year 1434, in Northern England and elsewhere.





	Nor Earth Sustain

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't quite sure how to tag this one; it's about John Uskglass but, true to character, he doesn't actually appear. Various other canon, original and historical characters make short appearances that I didn't think were worth tagging on their own.

There was a chill in the air, ice on the wind, something sharp in the shadow of the sky. Up on the high hills it had been snowing for days; here, in a sheltered corner of the Vale of York, the snow lay only in little patches cowering against the north sides of walls, but the chill remained, seeming somehow to have little to do with how cold it actually was.

Beth Ashby—who was generally known to be odd, but who was also a magician and knew about these things, after all—had returned from one of her wanderings that morning to say that the fairy road, the one that led sideways of a hedge two fields over from the York road, the one that had been her route into Faerie for fifty years, was closed. Her neighbours were not sure what to make of this—to them the fairy road was reason to be glad the hedges grew so high, a thing to warn children away from with stories about horrible goblins—but she seemed quite upset about it, and they, being in their way sympathetic, got the idea that this was something important.

‘He won’t come back,’ said Beth that night, as she sat by the fire in her niece’s house (where she lived when she was not wandering the fields and byways after magic). ‘It’s all closing now. They’re all gone.’

*

As with all magicians, the King was known sometimes to wander off heaven knew where (although even that was in some doubt, with him) for long stretches of time; it was said that some two hundred years ago he had gone away unannounced for a whole year. And so the nobles of the North assumed, quite reasonably, that this time would be no different. They appointed a council to govern the kingdom’s affairs in his absence, sent messengers southwards to explain the situation and convey that interference would not be appreciated, and settled into the year as though it was any other.

In a few weeks, the fairies began to leave. They were vague about their motivations as they generally were, but all managed to give the impression that important matters needed their attention elsewhere and that they no longer cared to remain in England. None of them said anything about coming back; but again, fairies generally didn’t. The nobles carried on regardless; they could govern the kingdom well enough with fewer fairies around, after all. The magicians, however, paid attention when their fairy-servants began to join the departing; and those who were still able to follow them on the increasingly few remaining fairy roads had worrying news to report when they returned. The King was not in his Faerie kingdom, nor did his people there know, when asked, where he had gone... nor did they, as they had on previous occasions, seem to expect his return.

*

John Kershaw, carpenter of Newcastle, was walking home from his work one spring afternoon when he saw that the sky was wrong.

The shape of the city being something so familiar that he paid it scarcely any deliberate attention from day to day, it took him some moments of standing staring up at the buildings before he realised consciously what was amiss, though part of him had known it for some time before.

All his life—as long as anyone could remember, going back hundreds of years—the King’s house had stood at the top of the hill behind its high raven-winged gates, stark and strange, above their daily sights. The view without it was so wrong that John had to count the other familiar buildings, make sure he could name each one, before he convinced himself that he had not been suddenly transported to some other city. They seemed to have rearranged themselves somehow, he thought; sliding round to fill the gap as though the other house had never been there.

*

It was later that year that Southern England retook possession of the North. It was not an invasion; the North, after all, had no king to resist them.

The twelve-year-old King’s regents, keen for any acquisitions that might help them in the war with France, made sure that power was transferred from Newcastle peacefully and speedily. But even as they took the crown and the power in his name, they did not claim for Henry the title of King of the North; they stopped short of declaring that the land was his. They dared not say so blatantly as that that they believed it could be.

*

While a few months passed in England, a castle was crumbling. Its halls and passages left empty, it passed back to the ground, and—a short time is not the right phrase to describe what passes in the Other Lands, but not long after it was left, it was on the way to becoming a ruin. Moss overgrew its stones, ivy climbed the walls, trees cracked the flagstones of the courtyard with their roots and raised twisted branches up towards the starry sky. 

But an unoccupied castle, even one such as this, rarely goes unregarded for long in Faerie, and by now a vicious battle raged beyond its gates.

When the battle was over, a figure walked into the courtyard—a figure dressed in a long green robe, with hair as pale and shining as thistledown—and looked at the ruin of old stones, and smiled.

*

In a little room at the top of a house in Norwich, a young man was scribbling intently on a scrap of paper. The room was close and stuffy, and lit only by the few stray shafts of sunlight that reached through gaps in the tightly closed shutters; one of these fell on the page, where down the left-hand side the young man had written a neat list of the names of spells. On the right-hand side were notes corresponding to the list. About one-third of the spells were marked here only with crosses, which became larger and more carelessly scrawled further down the page.

Having finished the page, the young man flung it away from him and turned over the next, on which was another list of spells, with the right-hand side blank. He stared at this for a few moments, then stood up, walked across the room and leant against the wall, burying his head in his hands. Presently he returned, read again the first item on the new list, and reached for the silver basin, the jug of water and the candle.

It was careful work, in the end. Peter Watershippe would spend ten years painstakingly testing and re-testing spells, recording which ones never worked again from the day he left and—more terribly—the many more that, one by one, became weaker and faded away as the years went by. Some would say, later on, that the effort and the heartbreak of those long years sent him mad; but Peter himself always believed that his fate was set from the first day.

*

Somewhere high above the cold ground a bell was ringing, its low toll sounding away towards the hills. Below, a long line of white-clad figures walked in stately procession through the dusk. They were the canons of Easby Abbey, going in to vespers. The abbot was not among them tonight; standing in a low room on the other side of the court, he watched them for a while, and presently turned back to regard the table before him, and the thing that stood on it.

Again he turned over the pages, and examined the strange lines that ran across them. It was not Latin, nor English, nor any other language that he knew. He doubted whether anyone now left on Earth would be able to read it; but it was not his to discover the book’s meaning, and he must trust that there was a purpose in having it here.

Keep it safe, he had said, on that day nearly a year ago. Tell no one what you have, but keep it here in waiting. Had the abbot known then what it would come to mean, what he would do, he would have... but no word nor deed of his could sway the mind of the King, he knew that well enough, and all that was left was to carry out the task he was given, for as long as he could.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from 'In the Bleak Midwinter', which always reminds me a little bit of the Raven King ('Yet what I have I give him…')—in any case I thought it was appropriate for the season.


End file.
